Tag Archives: American cuisine

Before I left home for the first time, I sat down with my mother’s recipe box and wrote down my favorite dishes. The recipe below is all that was written on both sides of my mother’s 3 x 5 card. When my siblings got together to combine all of the recipes we saved, one of my sisters had a different variation our mother uses of this iconic 1950’s American staple.

Note: I have not made this dish this way in years, so I do not have any pictures of it. Continue reading →

I do not make dinner rolls very often, because several family members are avoiding carbs or white flour breads. Jan’s friends came to Stitches and I was making them a Brazilian seafood stew. Jan’s friends are not avoiding white bread and I decided that pull-apart rolls would go well with dinner.

Several month ago, Eilene asked me to make Mac and Cheese sometime when her friends came over. While I have made this dish several times for her friends, this time she wanted something different. She wanted me to use pancetta, brie, apples, and almonds—instead of the usual cheddar or Emmentaler cheese. She also did not want me to use macaroni, but some kind of spiral pasta. Since, I am always sneaking in more vegetables, I also added some leek to the mix.

Jan asked me to make some cookies for a bake sale at the university. Before I left home for the first time, I sat down with my mother’s recipe box and wrote down my favorite dishes. Her chocolate chip cookies was one of my favorites, growing up.

Eilene is having some friends over. I decided to make their favorite Mac & Cheese. When she and her friends make this for themselves they, of course, use the “orange stuff in a box.” This is just starch, fat, and chemicals, not a meal.

Jan, my wife, is an anthropologist at SJSU. When she can, she arranges for her students to do “real world” projects for their assignments. This semester, she will be and her students will be part of a team, organized by NUMU Los Gatos, interviewing relocated American Indians who live in the South Bay—having moved to the city from various reservations in the 1950s, ‘60s, and 70s—if they are not recorded now their stories will soon be lost to history.

For weekday meals I have been known to take short cuts, like starting with a canned soup. Usually I boost the “tinned” flavor with some fresh seafood, but my daughter, Eilene, objects—“But fresh is so much better!” I have created a monster.

When I made hamburgers—a long time ago—I simply took the meat out of the package, formed it into patties and threw it on the grill. While I still think there is a place for a plain burger, you can do so much more to make simple ground beef into something to write home about. Of course, fancy burgers require fresh buns.

These salads are based on my mother’s potato salad, but the kids are coming over and this is a dilemma. They are on the Atkins diet, which means no potatoes. I decided that I would make two almost identical salads: One with potatoes for those of us eating starchy foods and a second with the potatoes replaced with cauliflower.